Habeas Brulee

Phew! So, I just remembered the confit in my fridge from many months ago, and I was searching around to see if it was safe to eat. I find this comment very reassuring!

The only arguably Malaysian curry I've made was Malaysian Beef Curry with Thick Onion Sauce (Daging Nasi Kandar) (photos and recipe available at the link), adapted from a recipe in Madhur Jaffrey's Far Eastern Cookery. I'm not sure how authentic it was, but it was really tasty!

My latest sweet creation was Apples Doused in Cardamom Wine (apples poached in cardamom honey wine served with cardamom whipped cream, to be more specific). The recipe is available here.

I have a question about meat grinders. I know they've been discussed here before, but now that you all have so much more experience with them, I'd like to see how your feelings on them have developed. I'm about to order my first meat grinder and sausage stuffer. For the stuffer, I think I'm going for the Grizzly 5 lb hand-cranked piston model. For the grinder, I know I don't quite want to splurge on an expensive electric one right now, so... I'm not sure whether I should get the KitchenAid attachment or a hand-cranked model (such as this one). Which would you recommend, and why?

110 for now.

I'm so excited to finally be joining in on this thread! I smoked up my first batch of bacon yesterday. My butcher wouldn't sell me less than 10 lbs, ribs included, so when we got the meat I trimmed off the ribs and some of the belly for dinner that night, and cut the rest into 3 slabs of approximately 2.5 lbs each. I did one slab with the maple cure, one slab with the Sichuan cure (Sichuan peppercorns and lapsang souchang tea) that was posted waaaay back in this thread, and the last slab with an experimental sage and mustard cure. Because of the size of my grill (one of those cylindrical Weber-ish ones with space for charcoal and wood in the bottom, a bowl of water/ice above it, and a round grill above that), I had to smoke the bacon in two batches. For the first batch, I used apple wood, and smoked the entire maple bacon and half of each of the others. For the second batch, I used hickory, and smoked the remaining halves of the Sichan and sage mustard bacons. The maple is amazing - the best for eating on its own, and probably the best bacon I've ever had. With the sage mustard batch, the sage flavor really came through. The Sichuan bacon was probably the least flavorful of the three. Both the Sichuan and sage mustard were better smoked over hickory than over apple - great over apple, but really extraordinary over hickory. I think that I prefer sweeter bacon for eating plain, and I expect the more savory batches to really shine best when used in chowders and such. So, coming up this week: chowder night, and bringing some of each bacon back to the butcher who sold us the belly. Our butcher shop is right around the corner from our apartment, and they are always wonderful and kind and excited, so we figure they'll enjoy getting a taste of what we've created from their meats. Next, I really want to make a Hungarian spiced bacon, and give that Calvados bacon Mallet just mentioned a try! Not to mention, I am quite possibly even more excited about the possibilities for using these gorgeous bacon skins than I am about the bacon itself.

Oh, okay! Still, not for me, because I love the way pre-heating the oven warms my apartment in the winter.

I fall into the 'seems like a lot of extra fat with no significant benefit' camp.

Why not pink sparkly sugar and a marzipan muck spreader on each? She can be and do everything! Now that's feminism for ya.

Here's another question: I have a ton of baby bok choy in my fridge that I fear will go bad before my partner and I can eat it (we're only two people, after all!). Can I kimchi it? I've been googling around, and getting a lot of opposing advice, some saying that I can, some saying that it's too.. something?.. and would just rot.

If you call KitchenAid customer service, you stand a decent chance of getting a free new one. They really, really take good care of people, I've found.

It worked! My second batch is fantastic. I'll comment with a link here as soon as I take some photos and post the more detailed recipe I ended up using to my blog. Thank you so much for your advice!

My family traditionally does Thanksgiving at Peter Luger's. We like steak better than turkey, anyways.

Does anyone have a good recipe for that cubed radish kimchi? The pretty simple kind that most restaurants serve in their banchan, I mean. I tried making it for the first time from this recipe, and it ended up tasting too fishy for me. I'd just try again with less anchovy sauce, but I don't know how reducing the anchovy sauce might affect the safety in leaving it out on the counter for two days, and I'm a little terrified. (Also, I'm curious to see how adding the rice flour porridge helps it.)

After getting my first crockpot a year and a half ago, and using it only a handful of times with mediocre, bland results, I'm finally giving it away this week. I find that it takes up way too much space for a tool I rarely use and by which I am usually disappointed.

JeanneCake - What a fun idea! You could make a really spicy fruit jam for that, too. Or get wild and use rosemary garlic jelly.

My favorite spicy brownies are my Raspberry Pomegranate Urfa-Biber Brownies, which are based on an Alice Medrich recipe. The recipe is available here. If you go look at the photo on the page I linked to, you'll see that they are very gooey indeed!

Since I've started boxing and weightlifting, I've found myself eating store-bought protein bars between meals. Okay, I confess, I prefer to go for granola bars, which are tastier. But it's hard to find a tasty bar that's high in protein, high in fiber, and low in calories. I've mostly been going for Kashi's chewy granola bars, since they're the best compromise I've found, but surely the combined brainpower of eGulleters can help me come up with something better. I'd love to make my own protein bars at home if I can. Surely the homemade sort would end up healthier and tastier, no? So - does anyone have a good recipe for homemade protein bars / power bars? Mr priorities: 1. Tasty. I really love chewy granola bars, so something along those lines would be ideal. 2. High protein. 3. Low calories. 4. High fiber. 5. Good shelf life. Thoughts? Advice? Recipes?

Rose Water. Palo Santo would be great if you're willing to go for "eclectic latin cuisine". Beautiful space, great food, appropriate price range. Their back room would work well for you.

Dorie's Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops. I made these last week, and everyone who tasted them exclaimed "Wow, these really do taste like Whoppers!"

I was hunting through my cookbooks for a ceviche recipe earlier, when I realized that (a) none of my cookbooks had one, and (b) I have no cookbooks which focus on seafood. (Unless you count 50 Chowders by Jasper White, which I absolutely adore.) I want to add some good seafood resource(s) to my cookbook collection. So, I ask you: What is your favorite seafood cookbook, and why?

(Post on my blog here.) I made Dorie's Cocoa-Nana Bread, and soaked it with the rum syrup from her Rum Drenched Vanilla Cakes recipe, thus creating Rum-Drenched Cocoa-Nana Bread. It was wonderful! It was still moist and delicious when we finished eating it almost a week later (shocking it took so long, I know, but there's only two of us here). Absolutely perfect. I anticipate making this again and again.

Wow, those razor clams look incredible!

I'm somewhere in the middle. I mostly measure when baking, but very loosely. As in, I'll use a measuring spoon, but decide to splash some extra vanilla extract in around it, just in case.

After reading Bron's recipe for Ginger Gems, I hunted around until I found an affordable gem iron on ebay. It arrived yesterday. A gem iron is a cast iron pan with 12 depressions that are rounded at the bottom. If you follow the link above, you'll see a few photos of what a gem pan looks like. I know I want to try that Ginger Gem recipe, and I'm told you can make any muffin recipe in a gem iron, too. My partner wants to pour his cornbread batter into it and see what happens. Does anyone else have gem recipes to share? What do you use your gem iron for, if you have one?